Archive for the ‘Art Photography’ tag
What is Art Photography?
Thomas Struth, National Gallery 1, London, 1985
Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present is currently on display at the National Gallery in London. The lack of natural lighting and the dark walls in the basement of the Sainsbury Wing evoke the solemn atmosphere of a crypt. In complete contrast to the liveliness of Trafalgar Square, visitors quietly whisper to each other as they slowly move from one room to the other. The show features the work of some of the best-known photographers of the 21st century displayed alongside renowned paintings from the National Gallery collection or specifically borrowed for this exhibition. The paintings add an art historical dimension to photographs produced by celebrated photographers and contemporary artists such as Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Sam Taylor-Wood or Thomas Struth – to name just a few.
Luc Delahaye, US Bombing on Taliban Positions, 2001
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet, The Battle of Jemappes, 1821
Martin Parr, Signs of the Times, England, 1991
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, about 1750
The majority of photographs are presented next to a painting, which, in turn, informs the aesthetic and formal appreciation of the photograph – one image in conversation with the other. For the most part, this conversation spans at least a century: Luc Delahaye’s spectacular panoramic photograph of a landscape in Afghanistan, captured just after the US bombed Taliban positions, references a battlefield tableaux by Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet from 1821. Martin Parr’s photograph of a rather depressing looking middle-class couple from the early 1990s references Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews circa 1750. Or Tom Hunter’s richly textured photograph Death of Coltelli references Eugène Delacroix’s painting The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827. In all of these cases, the photographers’ approach to their subject matter is subtle and carefully considered. Even without knowledge of the art historical reference, the photographs must be appreciated for their visual and conceptual characteristics. Quite clearly, the photographs critically examine a political, social and economic condition specific to the present, while at the same time, referencing artefacts of visual culture from the past. Rather than paintings merely invigorating the photographs, it is actually the photographs that illuminate our perception of the paintings.
Tom Hunter, The Death of Coltelli, 2009
Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827
Despite the huge potential to establish a blossoming relationship of exchange and interplay between two artistic mediums, the title of the exhibition Seduced by Art reveals a rather one-dimensional approach to the subject matter. In the exhibition, ‘art’ refers to painting (or in some cases sculpture) that photography, it is suggested, effectively borrows from. More specifically even, photography (or photographers) are ‘seduced’ by this art, giving into the temptation, no longer able to resist the allure of some of the best known paintings of Western art history. According to the exhibition curators therefore, Rineke Dijkstra is not merely referencing the Venus, but rather, Dijsktra is seduced by her beauty, irretrievably trapped, and thus produced a photograph with uncanny similarity to Botticelli’s painting. The fact that Dijkstra, like many of her contemporaries, works within the format of the photographic series, producing dozens of typological observations that have spanned numerous countries over the period of a decade, is completely lost in the exhibition. The comparison between Dijkstra’s photograph and Botticelli, while amazingly convenient, does not necessarily illuminate her body of work as a whole. As a case in point, Dijkstra attempts to do far more in her work than the exhibition would actually suggest.
Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992 and Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1490 [image detail]
The premise of the exhibition (e.g. photography ‘seduced’ by painting) thus raises a number of critical questions. Many of these questions have haunted photography since its very inception. Can photography be art? Is photography an art only if it references art proper? And vice versa, is photography that does not immediately reference art proper, not an art? What about photographs – conspicuously absent in this exhibition – that reference cinema, theatre, literature, architecture, advertising, television, popular culture, mass media or indeed other photography? Is that photography not an art? What about photography that, in the first instance, only references the subject it represents? These questions in themselves point to a rather rigid definition of art inherited by the canon. This rigidity is further underlined by presenting the photographs in rooms such as still life, the portrait, the figure and so forth, as if to suggest that the foundations of contemporary photography can only be located with reference to art historical traditions. Contemporary photography is politically too complex, semiotically too loaded, visually too aware of its own histories that it could be approached, categorized and disseminated in the traditions of the ‘Old Masters’. III Originally published on photomonitor.co.uk.
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The Many Bodies of Yurie Nagashima
Yurie Nagashima, Kazoku, 1993
In a previous blog post, I wrote about the photographer Yurie Nagashima whose photographs of herself and her family in the nude instigated a dramatic shift in Japanese visual culture. After exhibiting her phenomenally successful Kazoku series in 1993, Nagashima continued to interrogate photographic subjects related to gender, sexuality, representation and the body.
Yure Nagashima, Onion Boob and Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996
In one photograph, she holds an onion in front of her left breast while holding her t-shirt up by her teeth. This form of visual allegory and humorous photographic intervention locates Nagashima alongside artists such as Sarah Lucas who, in one photograph, placed two fried eggs in situ of her breasts. In the case of Lucas, the reference to female fertility and reproductive organs signified by the eggs is clear. In Nagashima’s case however, the onion is more difficult to locate since it does not immediately signify either the male or the female body. Instead, the onion might refer to the trope of perfectibility: the emphasis on aesthetic perfection of fruit and vegetable that is common in Japanese department stores. The perfect watermelon, the perfect carrot, the perfect onion, is, above all, determined by its symmetrical and even visual appearance. Nagashima’s photograph appears to question, even ridicule, this paradigm closely associated with consumerism and the representation of gender. Here, I am referring to consumerism in an economic sense but also consuming food as metaphor for consuming the female body. The onion thus functions as a pun on consuming and being consumed: in contrast to the soothing milk of the mother’s breast, Nagashima purposefully chooses a vegetable known not only for it’s acidic taste, but also, for causing tears. The unpeeling of the onion, and the allegorical pain associated with it, becomes the complete antithesis to the warmth associated with the mother.
Another photograph in which she has painted her breasts in the shape of two cartoon characters suggests that Nagashima’s preferred subject is her own body. Here, the body is not a neutral canvas or a corporeal ground zero, rather, the body functions as a potentially humorous even uncontrollable form explored by the camera. The physical act of taking a self-portrait is more closely located within the realm of performance art as Nagashima interrogates a corporeal and spatial interior by turning the camera on herself. In other words, the intervention takes places in Nagashima’s personal sphere via her body, while the camera acts as documentary device. Similar to the onion photograph, the cartoon characters serve as a visual pun that also acts to defamiliarize body parts. The cartoon characters have the effect of setting the photograph off from the classical iconography of the Nude and enabling it instead to act as asignifier for specific bodily functions. The defamiliarization of body parts also acts to desexualize the body as a whole. This visual methodology is perhaps most apparent in This Time, where Nagashima makes another direct gender specific reference to a bodily function. In his concept of the ‘grotesque body’, the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin argued that references to bodily excrement can act as a powerful device to invert a hegemonic social order. The allegorical blood on the floor situates the body outside of stereotypical representations of the body in mass media, consumer culture or pornography, placing it instead within a discourse of necessity and privacy.
Yurie Nagashima, This Time
It is ironic that as much Nagashima explores narratives of private life in her photographs, she was herself in the meantime turned into a celebrity figure in Japan. For a period of time in the mid-1990s, newspapers, magazines, TV chat shows, and the so-called ‘wide shows’, relentlessly pursued Nagashima in hopes of featuring the up-and-coming artist in their programming. With the emergence of a number of women photographers in a relatively short time period, from 1993 until about 1996, critics referred to Nagashima as a leader of a ‘girl photography boom’. Nagashima fiercely sought to distance herself from this label and, in the process, became critical of the media attention that her work has provoked.
Yurie Nagashima, Red Undwear
In as much Nagashima appears to engage in the pleasure of looking and being looked at in her photographic series Kazoku, in more recent photographs Nagashima’s gaze back to the spectator is noticeably absent. In one photograph, Nagashima’s back is literally turned towards the spectator. Viewed within the context of Nagashima’s resistance towards the increasing media attention, this gesture signifies her growing desire to be left unmediated. Even if this photograph relates to Nagashima turning away from the camera, from representation, from our gaze, she is still using her body to communicate this message. By performing to the camera, by deconstructing socially constructed gender identities, and by becoming object as much as subject of her photographs, the many bodies of Yurie Nagashima have reset the parameters of photographic discourse in her native Japan.
Please also read my post The Family Photos of Yurie Nagashima.
If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.
The Family Photos of Yurie Nagashima
Yurie Nagashima, from the Kazoku series, 1993
In 1993, at the age of 20, Yurie Nagashima received the Urbanart award hosted by the Parco Gallery in Tokyo for a series of photographs which would define her artistic practice until today. In her series Kazoku, or Family, Nagashima photographed herself along with her parents and brother – all of whom are naked. At the time, Nagashima’s family photographs were celebrated for pushing the boundaries of socially and culturally constructed taboos as much as they were derided for being obscene.
A reading of a photograph of Nagashima and her father playing golf on an indoor putting green helps to identify some of the aspects which caused this polarized reception of her work. As her father is concentrating on hitting the ball, Nagashima looks straight into the camera, her legs and body are positioned like a player reading the green on an actual golf course. Instead of concentrating in her father’s game, Nagashima looks at the camera, and by extension, at the viewer in order to underline that this exchange of gazes is one of the main subjects in this photograph. In other words, the image is not about playing golf, but it’s about looking and being looked at. Here I am primarily referring to an exchange of gazes between Nagashima and the spectator of the photograph. Indeed, this is a characteristic that runs throughout most of the photographs in the Kazoku series, Nagashima looks dispassionately at the viewer, almost as if to gage his or her reaction. Yet the golf photograph stands out because a third gaze, the father’s gaze, adds to the complexity of the image. The taboo that Nagashima addresses in this work is not the spectator seeing her naked, but rather, the possibility of her being seen naked by members of her family.
The golf photograph also addresses questions regarding gender and sexuality. While holding the golf club in between her legs, Nagashima not only disguises parts of her body, she also alludes to the golf club as phallic signifier. Here, the golf club as phallus also signifies power: in the photograph, it is the father who actively hits the ball, while Nagashima passively looks to the camera. The complete inversion of the strict dress code required on most golf courses suggests that, even in this very early photographic series, Nagashima targets socially constructed norms in society.
Yurie Nagashima, from the Kazoku series, 1993
In the Kazoku series, Nagashima’s preferred methodology is to insert the unexpected into images that are otherwise stereotypical forms of photographic representation. Apart from the subjects’ nudity, the group photograph of the Nagashima family for instance is strongly reminiscent of a standard family photograph. In what appears to be the living room, the parents are sitting in the front row, while Nagashima and her brother are kneeling in the back, as they all look straight into the camera. The mother sits in the customary seiza-style position as her hands are folded in her lap – a position expected of a woman even while dressed. Another reference to the family photo is the curtain in the background evoking the backdrop of a photo studio. On top of the subjects’ lack of clothing, the photograph also reveals very few objects that might help to situate the family in a social class. The barreness of their surroundings is mirrored by the bare bodies of the family members in the photograph. Instead, what Nagashima wishes the viewer to focus on is the structure of the family, the resemblance of family members, the representation of hierarchies within the family and also, the family being the first place where gender differences and asymmetry are socially defined.
Maki Miyashita, Rooms and Underwear, 1998
In 1993, when Kazoku project was first exhibited, Nagashima was at the forefront of a new generation of women photographers. At the time, Kazoku redefined the parameters of contemporary Japanese photography and Nagashima was heralded as a pioneer in her field. A number of photographers make direct or indirect references to Nagashima early photographic work. In the photographic series ‘Rooms and Underwear’ (1998) for instance, photographer Maki Miyashita borrows from Nagashima’s trope of combining the (partially) naked subject within a representation of domestic surroundings. In his series ‘For I Am the Mother and I Am the Daughter’ (2002), Noritoshi Hirakawa creates a mise-en-scène that is visually extremely similar to Nagashima’s family group photograph. Except in Hirakawa’s case, he asked mothers to switch their role with their daughters, while disavowing the presence of the male subject completely. Indeed, Nagashima herself returned to the subject matter of Kazoku in a series of photographs in which she asked different groupings of unrelated and unacquainted subjects to pose for her like in a family portrait. The result is an assemblage of strangers who, in the format of the studio photograph, convincingly appear like members of the same family.
Noritoshi Hirakawa, from ‘For I Am the Mother and I Am the Daughter’, 2002
Yurie Nagashima, Family Portraits, 2002
Yurie Nagashima’s Kazoku instigated a shift in photographic discourse in Japan: away from the male dominated field of street photography associated with Daido Moriyama, or the quasi-pornographic representation of women associated with Nobuyoshi Araki, to a more internally oriented narratives of private moments. While it may not have been Nagashima herself who single-handedly caused this shift in Japanese visual culture, she nevertheless represents part of a dramatic change that allowed women photographers to become active participants in a sign economy. Nagashima set the tone for a new generation of photographers, many of them women, emerging throughout the 1990s in Japan.
Please also read my post The Many Bodies of Yurie Nagashima.
If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.
